This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I missed The Doctor when its preview season in Islington was truncated by Covid shutdown. Now it arrives at the Duke of York’s theatre in the West End and the timing feels even more apposite.

Its subject is the tangled contest between hyper-rationalism and religious belief. In a lacklustre era for intellectually satisfying fare in the West End, this one is a zinger. It is Robert Icke’s adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play Professor Bernhardi, which explored tensions between Jewish and Catholic communities in the early years of the last century.

In a lacklustre era for intellectually satisfying fare in the West End, this one is a zinger

Icke allows Schnitzler’s core concerns about anti-Semitism and the clash of white coat and dog-collar their due. But he adds topical strains about the remit and risks of divisive identity politics. Juliet Stevenson is outstanding as a driven, witty, committed medic, Ruth Wolff , who has a blind spot for the views or sensitivities of others and the self-assurance of the confident professional: “I don’t go in for groups,” she says, at first haughtily and later in plaintive self-defence when the groupthink comes for her.

We meet her in consultation with her colleagues in a privately funded dementia research clinic, treating a girl aged 14 who is dying as the result of a botched illicit abortion (quite why the girl is not in hospital is a point not to dwell too long on — anachronisms will make visiting medics howl.)

A priest is sent to the bedside by absent parents to give the last rites. Wolff refuses, partly on the grounds of wanting to withhold the prospect of imminent death from the girl, but also because she doesn’t “get” the urgency from the priest’s point of view.

In Anthony Almeida’s nifty direction of lighting changes and jump cuts, we don’t see exactly what happens: she either stops him entering the room or pushes him (social media will make its divergent mind up about this in the melee afterwards).

PR-dominated institutions, cowardly donors, digital mobs and naiveté on the part of professionals who don’t take the threat seriously create a toxic brew. Cancel culture sharpens its claws and soon a cherished career and reputation hang in the balance. Stevenson’s taut energy is compelling as she fights back — but also starts to grasp that her identity as a doctor is part of the armoury of authority.

This is a shrewd and curious enough play for us to forgive lapses because it tests a range of biases and defaults with equal verve

To Icke’s credit, he puts an intelligent case for all viewpoints. Wolff endures a TV panel show, in which one interrogator after another cites some different identity trump card. Is Wolff herself, as a Jewish colleague reckons, suffering from a bout of anti-Semitism, even though she is the incarnation of the secular principle?

Does she disrespect the priest who is black, in a way she would not have done a white visitor? She insists not. But how much has she considered beliefs or dispositions different to her own?

Too much of a good thing when it comes to questioning identity leads Icke to cast many characters “against type” (so a black priest is played by a white actor and it is unclear who is a man or woman among Wolff ’s fellow medics). That creates too great a confused distance from all the characters apart from the compelling Stevenson as Wolff.

I also thought it a mistake to shoehorn a trans character and a euthanasia debate into the final half hour of the play. As a panellist on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, it felt like trying to do a whole series in less than three hours of theatre.

But this is a shrewd and curious enough play for us to forgive lapses because it tests a range of biases and defaults with equal verve. It is by far the most intelligent thing on the West End stage and a must-go-to, whatever your starting point.

We do need light relief now autumn has crept in and Much Ado About Nothing, which has just finished its stage run at the National Theatre, is working its way around the country on cinema screens.

I have been a bit churlish about the NT’s default style of Shakespeare. But given that Much Ado suffers from the problem of over-much familiarity with the spiky courtship of Benedick and Beatrice, I should do the decent thing and concede that this is a spirit-lifting bonanza of a production, whether you catch it on screen or in an inevitable revival.

Katherine Parkinson and John Heffernan are the surly lovebirds, while the setting in an Italian seaside hotel with ice-cream-hued balustrades and bathing huts offers as much potential for physical comedy as a plot which ranges from the inspired (love declarations being forced out of the duo by the subterfuge of their giddy friends) — and the dark, in the sacrificing of Hero (a fierce Ioanna Kimbook) to her father’s unbending honour.

Simon Godwin’s adaptation does what the National sporadically does best — making belly-aching comedy out of scenes which need updating to keep modern audiences laughing at 400-year-old jokes. So the lumpen constable Dogberry (a ponderous David Fynn) is here not only a vehicle for malapropisms, but also enjoys a repressed gay frisson as he badgers the distracted toffs for attention.

It is so smartly observed and genuinely funny that you leave feeling that even the worst wrongs can be righted and love will prevail. Also, wearing citric-bright hot pants helps. Good to know.